By Dan Feldman

Detroit Free Press Special Writer

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Dan Feldman writes for the Detroit Pistons blog PistonPowered. His opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the Detroit Free Press nor its writers. PistonPowered writers will contribute a column every Friday at freep.com/pistons. Contact Dan anytime at pistonpowered@gmail.com or on Twitter @pistonpowered.

His NBA head-coaching career began extremely impressively. He guided his team to a few playoff berths. But his star faded when his team got off to a terrible start to the season, and he was fired.

Still, another team hired him as a head coach. At his next job, he posted back-to-back seasons with the equivalent of about 30 wins each. Again, his team faced a decision of how to handle his future.

The Detroit Pistons fired Lawrence Frank.

The Boston Celtics retained Doc Rivers.

In the previous 10 years, someone has coached two consecutive full seasons with the same team and posted a winning percentage equal to or worse than Frank’s with the Pistons 17 times. In a majority of those instances (10 of 17), the coach was retained.

Neither the above numbers nor the Rivers example mean the Pistons should have kept Frank. Every situation is different. They’re meant only to provide a little context to Frank’s résumé.

Joe Dumars has fired coaches so often — if Dumars is retained as president of basketball operations, the Pistons will have eight coaches in his 14 seasons — Pistons observers seemingly have lost track of how the rest of the league handles coaches.

Similar situations indicate that the Pistons were a tad aggressive in firing Frank, who went 54-94 in his two seasons, but they definitely weren’t out of line.

There was no indication Frank would become the next Rivers, who won an NBA championship the season after his worse-than-Frank two-year run, has guided Boston to the playoffs every season since and is a favorite to become the next coach of Team USA — all after going 33-49 and 24-58 in his second and third seasons with the Celtics.

In general, the 10 times a team retained a coach after a two-year stretch worse than or equal to Frank’s didn’t work.

Byron Scott (Cavaliers) and Bernie Bickerstaff (Bobcats) lasted only one more season before being fired. Avery Johnson (Nets), Paul Westphal (Kings), Flip Saunders (Wizards) and Mike Dunleavy (Clippers) didn’t even make it through the following season.

So maybe the Pistons were proactively correct to fire Frank, given past results of similar coaches.

But Dumars has expressed a desire to establish coaching stability — “He might have the most job security in the whole NBA right now,” Dumars said when hiring John Kuester; and Dumars followed that at Frank’s hiring news conference by saying, “We are desperately trying to settle into a long-term coach” — and in that light, some have criticized the Pistons for dumping Frank so quickly.

The evidence suggests that the Pistons fired Frank quicker than most teams would in the same situation. But the evidence also suggests most of those teams wished they would have acted as quickly as the Pistons did.